At mile five, the underground hall ended at the edge of the Siphon Trench.
It was an artificial underground canal three hundred paces wide and stretching into the darkness as far as the eye could see. Millions of gallons of thick, sticky, boiling heavy-duty sludge churned slowly through the channel, streaming a foul, stifling heat that choked the lungs with the stench of rotten sulfur, rusted lead, and decomposed organic matter.
This was the drainage basin of the land-wide machine. The cesspool where thousands of years of uncollected potion-made waste, dead coolant, and stone settled mud had settled into an iron-hard mire.
Across the boiling morass ran a single Precursor service narrow high walkway. A skeletal bridge of silver-steel-copper alloy suspended by massive steel hawsers anchored into the vaulted ceiling.
Lin Tao stepped to the edge of the canal, his test vision analyzing the black, bubbling sludge below.
In physical database clusters, Lin Tao thought grimly, when you don’t implement self-running database vacuuming and garbage collection for three thousand years, the dead tuples don’t just disappear. They gather in the transaction logs until the disks fill up and the database locks down in read-only mode.
The sludge was the physical manifestation of that uncollected garbage.
